Tag: OSX

New Job, New Tech

Hello, world!

You might have noticed I took a little break from my blog recently. It was not intentional; things just got away from me a bit the last few months as I found a new job and had a nice vacation to see family in England (as well as a side trip to Edinburgh and the famous Fringe festival). Perhaps I will post more on the vacation another time; right now, I want to share my job news.

After a fantastic four years with CareEvolution, Inc., I recently accepted a software engineering position with Khan Academy. I am only a few weeks into my new position and I am still incredibly excited to have this opportunity. Not only am I working with some incredible people, we have tasked ourselves with an outstanding mission.

Our mission is to provide a free, world‑class education for anyone, anywhere.1

Leaving CareEvolution, Inc. was a difficult decision. Not only did it mean leaving behind extraordinary colleagues, it also meant leaving behind PowerShell, C#, Angular, and .NET as a part of my day-to-day profession. Instead, I will be working with React, Redux, Apollo, and Python. There is much for me to learn and, I hope, for me to blog about as I learn it. That said, I still love .NET things and will continue to tinker with them in my personal time2.

Of course, like my passion for .NET, some things will remain the same. Most significantly for me, the position is still remote and as such, provides me with great opportunities for personal growth as an offsite colleague and employee. I openly3 struggled with that while at CareEvolution, Inc. I hope that at Khan Academy, I can learn which parts of that struggle were down to the need for personal growth, and which, if any, were organisational. If I can, I will coalesce lessons I learn into a meaningful collection of tips that others might use to adapt their personal and organisational culture around remote work and off-site workers.

Finally, this blog is still my blog, these are my personal musings; nothing I post here represents the views of my employer. Thank you for your readership and your patience during my blog hiatus. As they say at work, onward!

Featured Image by Todd Quackenbush on Unsplash

  1. https://www.khanacademy.org/about [↩]
  2. I have already started developing .NET core on OSX [↩]
  3. perhaps too openly [↩]

Five things to love about modern.IE

You might be surprised to learn that the browser testing resources website, modern.IE (provided by Microsoft) is not just about Internet Explorer. Although some of the features are geared solely toward IE testing, some are browser-agnostic and can be very useful when developing websites. Here are a few of the things modern.IE can do for you.

Virtual Machines

Download virtual machines

Working on websites often means debugging using different browser variants. Unless you are exceedingly lucky, that will include older versions of Internet Explorer. While services like BrowserStack are invaluable for testing, they cost money and are not always responsive enough for productive debugging. Instead, I have found virtual machines (VM) to be much more useful.

Microsoft has been making VM's available for Internet Explorer testing via the website modern.IE for quite some time now. You can download VM's for whatever development platform you have, whether it is OS/X, Windows, or Linux.

Available versions of Internet Explorer
Available versions of Internet Explorer
Select virtual machine platform
Select virtual machine platform

Azure RemoteApp

If you want to test your work against the latest Internet Explorer in Windows 10 and you do not want to download a virtual machine, or are working from an unsupported device, Azure RemoteApp is for you.

Azure RemoteApp

All you need is a Microsoft Live ID and you can login and test with the latest IE for free.

Browser Screenshots

Browser Screenshots

Just want to check what your site looks like across various browsers and devices? The Browser Screenshots feature of modern.IE will give you screenshots across nine common browsers and devices. Somewhat surprisingly (at least to me), this includes more than just Internet Explorer; at the time of writing, you get:

  • Internet Explorer 11.0 Desktop on Windows 8.1
  • Opera 12.16 on Windows 8.1
  • Android Browser on Samsung Galaxy S3
  • Android Browser on Nexus 7
  • Mobile Safari on iPhone 6
  • Safari 7.0 on OS X Mavericks
  • Chrome 36.0 on Windows 8.1
  • Firefox 30.0 on Windows 8.1
  • Mobile Safari on iPad Air

Not only will it give you the screenshots, but you can share them with others, generate a PDF, and more.

Site Scan

This scan checks for common coding practices that may cause user experience problems. It will also suggest fixes when it can. Not only that, but the source is available on GitHub so that you can run scans independently of modern.IE and the Cloud.

Site Scan

I ran this against my blog and it took just over seven seconds to return the results.

Compatibility Report

Compatibility Scan

This feature will scan a given site for patterns of interactions that are known to cause issues in web browsers.  The first time I tried to run this, it did not work. However, a second attempt gave me results.